What do we want to achieve? Teaching to fish or….

Our vision is to help people help themselves in improving their conditions.

“Improving condition” is a very wide topic. The obvious is to have access to education, to water, to light, to safe living environment, etc… But there is more to it…

Every little things that makes your life better is an improvement. And it will depends on every individual. We do not all want the same things, and we will not all feel an improvement with the same actions/items. And for me, those little things can be/should be the first step to improving access to education, to water, etc…

Improving condition is also a slow process – you improve step-by-step. It is like building a house: one brick after the other – “Rome was not built in one day”…

I have been told recently that what I was doing was great. That it is better to teach people how to fish than to give them a fish (and, again… another cheesy saying… I love them!). But then, this was never my pretention in a way. I thought about it differently… A lot of what we are trying to do is not even about teaching to fish. It is rather to show people that they already know how to fish… they have the tools, they have some knowledge… it is now for them to use it in a different way… They can be/are the solution for many things…

And so, we do lay the foundation bricks or plant the seeds, however you want to say it, in people mind about their capacity. We try to motivate. We try to empower. We try to bring confidence. We try to bring support.

What we try to achieve is for people to feel that they can actually do something for themselves. At individual or community level.

And we can see that it is starting to happen.

People putting an idea into action, only because we say they could. They had thought of it, but were too shy to start. Now, they can start to unlock their potential because they have someone beside them.

People being motivated because they read at the back of Maya “Be Proud of what you do, even your mistakes. Because mistakes mean that you are trying”. We rarely get things right first time!

People “finding” money (that they had) to buy something they wanted because we showed them basics of money management.

People realising that they don’t need me to build the roof of a community building… I don’t know how to do it… but they do! They have the supplies, they have the knowledge… They only need to work together as a community!

You can find some stories on the Project website, with more to come as I manage to publish them…